The Iron Woman (5 page)

So it was not just a simple matter of throwing out a girl and a boy who were neither of them very heavy.

In the end, they were thrown out. But not before everybody in the office block had come crowding to see the cause of the uproar, and had tried to get into the action. And whoever touched any of those who had fought with Lucy and Hogarth was hit by the same explosion of screams. It was exactly what Hogarth had called it – instant contagion. Everybody was utterly bewildered. Secretaries who had only been pushed aside staggered away, stunned by what they had heard and glimpsed. And now when they touched each other, there it was again. Nobody knew where the screams were coming from or how they came or why.

The whole shouting mob burst out through the glass doors at the front of the office block, where Lucy and Hogarth managed to stumble clear. Now Lucy turned, and shouted again:

‘Now you know what it’s like. That noise is the
creatures
screaming with your poison. Now you’ll never get away from it.’

‘Get out of here!’ roared the Manager. His collar was burst. His tie was gone. Somehow his jacket sleeve was almost ripped off. All this had happened in his efforts to escape from the screams.

‘The police are on their way. They’ll settle you people.’

The effect on those office workers was shocking. Secretaries sat sobbing. Men wandered from office to office with staring eyes. Nobody could explain it, and nobody could think of anything else. None of them could escape the fact that when they touched each other both were stunned by the screams. It was as if they had all become high-voltage scream batteries.

And some of them, some more vividly than others, saw things in the screams. As they heard that dreadful outcry, they saw tiny creatures with wide mouths and terrible eyes, clinging to grass or weed or pebbles. They glimpsed the massed faces of fish, as if they were seeing the streaming leaves of a lit-up tree in a big wind at night, with every leaf the face of a fish, trembling as it screamed.

Nothing could explain it. But there it was. They all felt they might be going mad.

In the Manager’s office the important people had assembled. The Chief Chemist, the Head of Accounts, the Sales Manager, the Chief Engineer, the Public Relations Officer. They were like people after a mass accident. They simply stared, in a numbed sort of way, or watched the Manager. And he knew he ought to do something. But what could he do?

‘Idiots going on about poisons,’ he raged. ‘What is all this? We follow good industrial practice. We stick to the
rules. We spend our lives cleaning up other people’s muck and –’

He threw up his hands. But they all knew that this was not just an ordinary protest. What they were all thinking about, and what kept them all so silent, was the thought: If we touch each other again, the screams are there. Those horrible, horrible screams. What are they? And what do they mean?

And two or three were thinking: How long will it last? Will it wear off? What about when I get home and my wife gives me a kiss? What happens when the dog jumps up at me?

They had no idea, of course, that the truly dreadful things had hardly begun.

Lucy and Hogarth walked home in a daze. Her plan had worked too well in a way. But in another way it hadn’t worked at all.

‘They’ve all caught it!’ cried Hogarth. ‘Did you see that man’s face? I thought it was going to fly off and out through the window when I grabbed his ears.’

‘But will it stop the factory?’ Lucy almost frowned.

‘It might!’ cried Hogarth. ‘They’ve got to think about it. How long do you think it will take before the whole world’s plugged into the giant scream? And nobody dare touch anybody else?’

The idea horrified him. At the same time, he felt like
rolling on the ground with laughter. It was horrifying – but also amazing, wonderfully amazing! To think of such a thing!

And Lucy too, she was frightened by everything that was happening. At the same time, she was dazed with excitement. After all, if that was the way things were, that was the way they were.  

Her mother and father were less trouble than she had expected. Once she had grabbed their hands and let them hear what everybody was talking about, they sat
listening
to her. She told them everything. As they listened, they began to feel slightly afraid of their daughter.  

‘But this business about closing the factory,’ her father kept saying.  

‘Destroying it,’ corrected Lucy. ‘Not closing it.’  

‘But people’s livelihoods!’ he cried. ‘Everybody works there. What do you think I’d do?’  

‘That doesn’t bother the Iron Woman,’ said Lucy. ‘All she thinks about are the screams. Some of those screams are baby screams, you know.’  

Her parents stared at her. She reminded them again of the creatures that had come dancing and writhing up the tunnel of fire. Her mother sighed and rested her forehead on her hands. She stared down at the table.  

‘How do you come to be mixed up in all this?’ shouted her father. ‘Why you?’ The wrinkles on his brow were a new, unfamiliar shape. His hair was tousled,
as if he had just got out of bed in the middle of the night.

‘The Iron Man will know what to do,’ said Hogarth. He wanted to make Lucy’s parents feel better. But now they turned their stare on him, with the same dreadful, anxious look. Blackish rings had appeared under their eyes. And Hogarth was thinking: Is this how people look during a war? – when there came a knock on the door.

‘The police!’ gasped Lucy’s mother, looking more haggard than ever.

‘Why should it be the police?’ cried Lucy. ‘I’m not going tearing up any factory. I’m not the Iron Woman.’

Her mother opened the door. Three journalists stood there from the local newspapers. And as they
introduced
themselves, others, behind them, were getting out of cars.

The family managed to get to bed finally, but none of them could sleep. Their brains were spinning. They would be headlines in the morning. And before noon the television people were coming.

Lucy had put the cup with the snowdrops and the vase with the foxglove beside her bed. She fancied she could see the snowdrops glowing slightly in the dark. Though the journalists had asked a thousand questions, she had never mentioned the Iron Woman. They had
gone off thinking it had all begun with her – Lucy. All they could think was: This girl has abnormal powers. And they argued with each other about different
explanations
.

Hogarth lay in his tent, listening to the orchard and the darkness. Everything was so silent now, he thought he could hear the stars rustling. How could the whole globe seem so silent with that terrible scream, somehow, still going on. He took hold of his left wrist with his right hand. Silence. It needed two people to plug into the scream. Then a tawny owl hooted, just above his tent, and his hair went icy. He curled up and pulled his sleeping bag over his head. And suddenly he was
thinking
of the Iron Man. He imagined him coming across the country in a straight line. So he fell asleep dreaming about the Iron Man, who seemed to grow, till he was far bigger than the Iron Woman, as he strode through the night, over trees and houses, with the moon glistening on his metal.

Next morning Hogarth and Lucy were up early. They planned what they were going to do. Lucy left a note for her parents:

Soon they were climbing up towards the woods behind the town. They scrambled over a brambly bank and were among the trees.

‘Look!’ hissed Hogarth. He was pointing at the ground. Lucy gazed at the deep, huge prints in the soft mould. ‘The Iron Man. No toes, you see. Your Iron Woman has toes.’

The track led up through the woods to the field
above, that climbed to a hilltop. And there they were, sitting facing each other, two colossal figures, their backs to the boles of great cedars that grew among the ancient stones on the hill’s very crown.

‘We’re here,’ yelled Lucy, and ran towards them. ‘It’s us.’

The immense heads turned.

‘Iron Man!’ shouted Hogarth. ‘I knew you’d make it.’

Lucy told them everything that had happened: the fight in the offices, the journalists, the television crew coming today. The enormous eyes glowed. The Iron Man’s glowed amber. The Iron Woman’s glowed black. But not a sound came out of either of them.

‘Why don’t you come and let the TV people see you?’ cried Hogarth. ‘You could give them the screams, on
television
. Then they’d have to believe. Everything would have to change.’

‘Oh yes, you must come,’ cried Lucy. ‘Just the sight of you –’

A humming started up within the Iron Woman. ‘Nothing would change,’ came the deep, rumbling, gentle voice.

Lucy and Hogarth stared at her. What did that mean? Weren’t the screams going to change everybody? And the sight of the Iron Woman, as a giant
scream-transmitter
– wouldn’t that change everything?

‘It needs something more,’ said the great voice, up through their shoe-soles.

Hogarth and Lucy were baffled. How could there be anything more?

‘So what do we do?’ asked Hogarth.

The rumbling started again. And the voice came again: ‘Do?’ Then again, louder: ‘
Do?
’ Then, with a roar: ‘DO?’

And Lucy and Hogarth almost fell over backwards as the Iron Woman, in one terrific heave, got to her feet. Branches were torn off as she rose erect among the cedars. And her arms rose slowly above her head. Her fists clenched and unclenched, shooting her fingers out straight. Then clenched again. She lifted one foot, her knee came up, then:

BOOM!

Her foot crashed down. The whole hilltop shook and the sound echoed through her great iron body as if it were a drum. Again, her other foot came up – and down:

BOOM!

Ripping the boughs aside, her fists clenching and unclenching, her feet rising and falling, Iron Woman had begun to dance. There in the copse, in a shower of twigs, pine cones, pine needles and small branches, she revolved in her huge stamping dance, in front of the Iron Man whose eyes glowed bright gold. And she sang, in that deep, groaning, thundering voice of hers: ‘Destroy the ignorant ones. Nothing can change them. Destroy them.’

She went on repeating that over and over, in time to
her pounding footfalls, as she turned round and round. Lucy hid her mouth behind her clenched fists. The Iron Woman was terrifying. She was overwhelming. She was tremendous.

‘Give them a chance,’ Lucy screamed. ‘Let’s see what they say today. They might have changed already.’

She just yelled it out at the top of her voice. Her father was one of the ignorant ones, according to the Iron Woman. But it was no good. The giant dancer’s eyes were glowing a dark red. She stamped each foot down as if she wanted to shatter the whole leg.

‘Nothing will change. Only their words change. They will never change. Only their words change. Only their words only their words only their words …’

Then her voice became simply a roar. And now it seemed to Hogarth that inside her roar he could hear the scream, the wailing and the crying of all the
creatures
, roaring out over the woods. And again he began to see the faces, large, small, tiny – the wide mouths and the terrible eyes of the SCREAM.

But now the Iron Man was getting up. And he
suddenly
spoke. His voice was not so loud as the Iron Woman’s, but it was harsher, more piercing.

‘I have an idea.’ And he held up his arm.

The Iron Woman had stopped. Slowly, she lowered her arms, but her eyes, fixed on the Iron Man, glowed red as ever.

‘Destroying them is no good,’ he said, in his dry,
grating
voice. Lucy heard all the cogs in it. They were stiff, because he spoke so rarely. ‘You could not destroy them all,’ he went on. ‘And everything would be rebuilt as before. New factories, the old poisons. New people, the old stupidity. Nothing would be changed.’

The Iron Woman’s eyes darkened. And down below, close to the ground, the two pairs of human eyes stared up, round as the eyes of two rabbits.

‘Listen to me now,’ said the Iron Man.

But instead of speaking, he took the Iron Woman’s hand, and seemed to listen.

‘Just as I thought,’ he said. ‘The scream is terrible. And yet it needs something extra.’

Then he took the Iron Woman’s other hand with his other hand, so he was holding both her hands in his. All this time he must have been hearing the cry of the
creatures
through her hands. Now he craned his head
backwards
and looked up into the sky. Lucy could see that his eyes, too, had become red, and so fierce that a red beam went up from them – quite clear and strong even in the bright morning light.

For two or three minutes nothing happened.

‘What’s he doing now?’ whispered Hogarth.

But Lucy was looking up at the sky. Only a little patch of blue showed, away to the south. The rest was cloud, but quite bright. An even, crumpled layer. And
yet something funny was going on, directly above. It looked like a darker dot, spinning.

‘Is that a bird?’ whispered Lucy, pointing up.

No, it was a small, dark cloud. Already it seemed to have an odd shape. It seemed to be lowering a strange, spinning wisp of itself. A spinning tail of cloud. And the whole cloud seemed to be growing, as it came lower, and lower. It looked like the pictures of a waterspout at sea. But it wasn’t whirling upwards, it was spiralling
downwards
, worming its way towards them.

As it came, they heard a faint roar, like the far-off sound of a big aircraft behind the clouds. That is what Hogarth thought it was. But then he realized the sound was coming from that whirling corkscrew of gloom as it descended, louder and louder.

And now the tip of it was only just above the Iron Woman’s head. There it stayed for a while, like a long spinning top, writhing and roaring. Or like a machine drill about to be lowered. The roar was now stupefying, like the roar of a jet plane as it swings towards the
runway
for takeoff. Lucy and Hogarth covered their ears. The din was painful.

And now it seemed they could see something strange in the spinning cone. As if it kept stopping – just for a moment, like a skater spinning on the toe of one skate who stops just for the fraction of a second at each
revolution
. And just as you get a fleeting but quite clear
glimpse of the whirling dancer’s face, in that momentary stop, so now Lucy and Hogarth saw, in the towering
tornado
cloud, scales.

Scales!

Yes, there it was, just a glimpse – then another, and another. Scales!

But now the most astonishing thing of all happened. That spinning dark column of scales touched the Iron Woman with its drill point. It touched the top of her head.

Immediately her body seemed to begin to disappear. Actually it began to vibrate. Her body became a blur of vibration. The Iron Man’s hands, which still gripped hers, also disappeared in a blur.

As she vibrated, that whirling tower of darkness and scales was pouring into the Iron Woman. And as it poured into her, she seemed to grow.

For minute after minute it went on. More and more darkness came down the spinning cone. The blurred mass of the Iron Woman grew bigger and began to glow blue. And still it went on. Till they saw the upper end of whatever it was lashing about in the sky like a great tail. Still pouring down into the Iron Woman, it was coming to an end.

The roar grew screechier. Suddenly, with a thin,
ripping
scream like an express train piling into a tunnel too small for it, that lashing tail dived into the Iron Woman
and vanished. The instant silence was shocking.

Her shape had reappeared, but now twice as big as it had been, and glowing blue, like the glass of a blue lamp. The Iron Man, his arms reaching up, still held her hands. As they watched, she darkened, and as she
darkened
, she shrank. At last, she was her normal size again and the Iron Man released her.

‘Now,’ he said, grinding his voice box, ‘now you have all the power of the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon, my mighty slave from the depths of the universe. It has packed itself inside you. It has become your power.’

The Iron Woman did not move. She seemed stunned by what had happened to her. Her eyes were half closed, gazing at the Iron Man who now spoke again:

‘Whatever you want to do, you can now probably do it. The power of the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon is almost infinite. Be careful what you wish for – because now it will come true. Its power,’ said the Iron Man, ‘is unearthly.’

The Iron Woman laughed softly. She laughed again, more strongly, a rumbling low laugh. She laughed again, louder. Then she turned, abruptly, and gazed out over the woods, towards the town. Lucy could see she had obviously made up her mind about something.

‘What will you do?’ she cried. Lucy was thinking of her father, she was suddenly afraid of what the Iron Woman might do to him, along with his workmates.

The Iron Woman looked down at her. Instead of black, or red, her eyes were now deep, dark, fiery blue. And all her body, it seemed to Lucy, was blacker – so black it seemed almost blue. But the Iron Woman only said: ‘It is almost midday. Go and give your interview. To the television crew. At the gate of the factory.’

And again she laughed her rumbling, strange laugh that seemed to sink away into the earth.

Lucy and Hogarth set off down the hill.

Minutes later, they saw the TV vans, the cameras, and the small crowd waiting for them at the factory gate, and their hearts sank. This was going to be difficult.

‘Remember the scream,’ said Lucy.